The weird thing about sports fandom is how people can demand certainty from something that’s built on chaos, and nowhere does that show up more dramatically than on Super Bowl day. Fans spend weeks—sometimes entire seasons—arguing over matchups, injuries, coaching decisions, and which quarterback has the “it” factor, and then, right before kickoff, they still want one more thing: a prediction from someone famous enough to make it feel like the universe is casting a vote.

Most of the time, those predictions are harmless. A celebrity picks a team, the internet laughs, and then everyone moves on. But when the person doing the “picking” is the sitting President of the United States, it lands differently. It stops being just a casual take and becomes a cultural moment, something people interpret through whatever feelings they already have about power, influence, and attention. That’s why the reaction was so intense when Donald Trump posted about the Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks and seemed to tease a choice without actually saying the name.

In a normal world, that’s just a playful move, a little cliffhanger. In the world of social media—especially when it involves a political figure who people either strongly support or strongly oppose—it turns into fuel. Supporters treat it like hype. Critics treat it like manipulation. Sports fans, meanwhile, treat it like the most irritating kind of non-answer: the person who starts telling you the ending of a story and then stops mid-sentence. The framing made it feel like he was about to crown a winner, and that alone was enough to light a match. People weren’t just watching football anymore; they were watching the performance of withholding, the deliberate tease, the way the attention economy works even when the subject is something as straightforward as a game.